We say stood, for, alas, it stands no more. It has gone the way of all the row, that way which befalls houses as well as human beings, though the houses can boast of greater possible longevity. We paid a visit to the site of the old house just after the building itself had been pulled down to make room for the new road that leads up to the Albert Hall.

We wished to take a farewell look at the gardenthat garden where Wilberforce sat and read under the shade of the old walnut and mulberry trees, older still now by half a century, where Louis Napoleon chatted with the Countess of Blessington, and Tom Moore admired the last amateur effort of his artistic friend "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," Count D'Orsay; and where Soyer may have looked smilingly round on gormandizing visitors appreciating his culinary triumphs. Alas! when we arrived at the scene of these departed glories we found that all access to it was barred by a horribly unpicturesque hoarding, covered with still more unpicturesque advertisements. Not feeling interested in the statement that “The Moore and Burgess Minstrels never performed out of London," or speculating as to whether the Daily

Telegraph was better off with "the largest circulation in the world" than the Daily News with a "worldwide" one, or even seduced by the thoughts of a trip to Brighton and back for 3s., we turned round by the Albert Hall, and looked about for some means of getting into the gardens and treading on the site of Gore House. As our time was short, and our historical minds wound up to the highest pitch, and the fence was not more than twelve feet in height, we cast a furtive glance around, and seeing no one to make remarks, tumbled somehow or other over the wall, and at once started to ramble.

The garden was in an awful mess, strewed with brick-bats and rubbish, very different to what it must have been in the time of William Wilberforce, who speaks of its thick foliage, and says he can almost imagine himself two hundred miles away from the great city. Its present state reminded us more of its first tenant, some miserly Government contractor, who was so stingy that he let the garden grow wild rather than waste a farthing over it. But to return to Wilberforce, who succeeded him. We like to think of this great man with gratitude, and speak of him after

the manner of his monumental inscription in Westminster Abbey. We like to think of the delicate boyat the age of fourteen addressing a letter to the editor of a York paper "in condemnation of the odious traffic in human flesh," and of the old septuagenarian, true to his purpose during those sixty years, thanking God on his death-bed that he had lived to witness a day when England was willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery. This seems to have been the one purpose for which Wilberforce was born, and it is well for him that his memory will be handed down to posterity almost solely for his services on behalf of the slave. Other sides of his character are not so pleasing. Ardent as he was in the cause of bodily freedom, he would have forced his own doxy and creed on the world without the slightest regard for religious liberty. He imagined himself a special favourite of God, and his diary is full of pious self-congratulation. We find him speaking of walking from Hyde Park Corner to Gore House, and repeating the one hundred and seventy-six verses of the 119th Psalm, "in great comfort." What a memory he must have had!

The next name on the roll of Gore House celebrities is that of Margaret Power, Countess of Blessington.

Philosophers and historians have not yet decided how much of the career of a human being is due to his own inherent character, and how much depends on the modifications of external circumstance. But no one can doubt that in analyzing any one's character much importance must be attached to daily surroundings. If ever woman was surrounded by evil influences, that woman was Margaret Power.

Her father was "Edmund Power, Esq., of Knockbrit, near Clonmel, in the county of Tipperary." He was a type of that evil race of last century Irish squires, a curse to their country and themselves. Of those bad men Edmund Power seems to have been the worst. His character was that of a savage who has adopted all the vices which accompany civilization, with none of its benefits. In his native country he was known as the "Buck," "Shiver the Frills," and "Beau Power," and is said to have been "a fine looking man, of an imposing appearance, showy, and of an aristocratic air, very demonstrative of frills and ruffles, much given to white cravats, leather breeches

and top-boots." He was dissipated, reckless, and extravagant, a tyrant-at-home, a Roman Catholic, who turned Protestant and then hunted the Romanists so fiercely as to bring upon himself a charge of murder. When, at the age of seventy, he died, the only preparation for that event of which he could boast was that he had been able to take his four or five tumblers of punch the evening before."

Such was Margaret's father.

Before she was fifteen, this father sold his daughter to a man as brutal as himself.

This man, a Captain Farmer, whom we may charitably believe to have been half a madman, used to strike his wife on the face, pinch her till her arms were black and blue, lock her up whenever he went abroad, and half starve her.

At length a separation took place. In 1817, Farmer ended his worthless life by dropping, when drunk, from a two-pair-of-stairs window, leaving his widow, of whom, for about the space of nine years little is known, a free woman.

Her second husband was the Earl of Blessington, who, it has been said, was as foolishly mad as her first was mad mischievously.